Chapter 21 #2
He’d seen the way she flew Six.
He’d seen how effortless it was for her. She had greatness woven into her very bones, the ability to fly like so many of the boldest Eagle Riders he’d known...and she truly had no clue.
“No time to waste, Raphonminder!” He opened the black door for her, the cold pouring instantly out. “We’ve got a king and queen’s blessing to earn, and after that – an Acolyte to kill!”
She glowered at him.
Beautiful, tortured soul.
She was so godsdamned like him.
She was just about to enter the doorway when—
No, Kinlear thought. No, no, no.
Because there was that awful claw sliding across his lungs, his throat...his illness taking shape and doing its best efforts to ruin the day.
He coughed.
But it was deep and painful and... he’d tasted blood with it. He quickly went for a handkerchief, wiped his lips to try and hide the evidence.
She couldn’t know, not now, when she’d hardly learned anything about him. He’d be damned if his oncoming death was the first real thing she discovered.
So, he lied, as he often did.
He told her he was only sick from a cold, that’d he’d drank too much, slept too little...
She stared at him, not buying it one bit.
You’re not building trust, Kinlear told himself. You’re stacking a tower with broken bricks and if you’re not careful, it’ll all come crumbling down.
But he couldn’t stop.
This was how he’d always built things. With shattered pieces and shaking hands.
“Let’s go, Raphonminder,” he said. “The clock is ticking, and there’s a war to be won.”
She moved past him, into the darkness...
But as he was shoving the handkerchief into his cloak pocket, she quickly glanced back. And saw...he was certain she saw...the smear of blood upon it.
She’d tamed the beast.
Oh, she most certainly had.
The two were a pair, both stubborn and full of sass that made Kinlear weak in the knees. They were a force.
And he...
Had his hands full. That much was clear.
He tried his best to guide her through the motions of saddling, for he’d done that a thousand times with the war eagles. Always with the help of a scribe, for how weak his arms, and how enormous the saddles, but he knew the motions. He could have done them with his eyes closed.
The problem?
She did not enjoy his helpful tips.
Every time he spoke, she snapped at him.
Every time he offered a bit of advice...she looked like she was going to rip his head off.
“Are you aware how many war eagles I’ve minded? How many I’ve saddled and sent to the skies?” Kinlear asked her, as he sat on a stool outside the cage.
Six was lazy as usual, sighing through her nostrils as she stood there, and Kinlear realized how much she’d grown in the last few weeks. She was looking more like the raphon from his dreams.
Ezer shrugged. “Quite frankly, Your Highness, I don’t give a damn.”
Gods, she was mean.
He adored it.
He was reveling in that fact when he caught Six glaring at him. Like...she very much wanted to rip his head off, too.
You’re alive because of me, demon! He thought.
He swore he saw the beast’s claws slide a bit further out.
“I know,” Ezer said, crooning at the monster like it was a newborn babe. “But he’s here, whether we like it or not.”
“You know I can hear you, right?” Kinlear asked from his stool.
Ezer ignored him and kept working.
He smiled the entire time he watched her, sending little twists of his verbal knife. She stabbed back with words just as sharp, each time.
His blood heated.
His heart thumped and his very soul roared in victory.
It was an effort not to laugh as Six herself threw a few punches. It was mostly in the form of shifting weight, or wings in Ezer’s face or, most disrespectfully, a pile of fresh waste upon Ezer’s boots.
The raphon was just as bold as Ezer, and Kinlear burst into laughter.
“Stop laughing,” Ezer growled at him. “Neither she nor I were prepared for this today.”
He crossed his arms and peered at her through the bars. “It’s clear you’ve never saddled a beast before. You don’t prepare a war mount. You simply do. You haven’t even tied her down.”
Ezer gasped.
Oops.
“I will do no such thing.”
And then...to his surprise, she turned and demanded that he give her one of his rings.
He was about to object, when he noticed, suddenly...that all the gifts he’d sent to her, while he was healing?
They were piled in the corner of the raphon’s cell. Beautiful, precious heirlooms from Lordach’s past, all covered in dusty shavings. Treasures he’d wrapped with a silken black bow, his hands trembling, his hope coiled in his heart as he’d passed them off to Izill to deliver.
She’d given them all, every single gift...to Six.
Well.
That one hurt a bit.
Kinlear blinked at her. “What in the Ehver happened while I was gone?”
“A mutual understanding,” Ezer said through the bars. “Ring, please.”
It ached him, cut him to the core, as he placed a fat emerald ring into her palm. She gave it to the raphon like an offering, and picked up the saddle once more.
He tried to guide her again with his words. He only wanted to help, but each time he spoke, or uttered, “Wrong,” she stiffened and released a frustrated sigh. The raphon hated the saddle. She refused to cooperate, no matter what Ezer tried...
“Wrong again,” Kinlear sighed.
“Out!” Ezer yelped.
She spun towards him as Six skittered away, saddle flying from her back. It slammed against the bars with a loud clang.
And things only got worse when Six just quit. The raphon, fierce as she was, scurried to the corner of the cell and hid behind her wings.
Kinlear didn’t even know raphons could do such a thing.
“Out, please,” Ezer said, breathing deeply. “And don’t come back until you’re called.”
He felt like he’d been slapped. A little dark shadow rose within him. “It’s unwise to speak to a prince as if he is a dog,” he said, through gritted teeth.
“I don’t particularly care what is wise,” Ezer said, and this time, when she looked at him?
He could see true fury on her face. He could see a deep and seething rage that twisted her scars and turned her beauty into brutality.
“You placed me in here, you put me in charge. When we work, we are silent. And that, Your Highness, is something you cannot seem to be.”
He stared at her, open-mouthed.
By the gods. His feelings...
Were they actually hurt?
He hadn’t felt this way in years, not since he was a child, laughed at for his weaknesses.
But Ezer wasn’t done landing hits. She curled her fingers around the bars, while the raphon hid behind her.
“I was perfectly fine, making progress the past many days without you. You could have left me for dead, and you wouldn’t have known.
You wouldn’t have cared, until you came back to find your precious little project pet sitting over my corpse! ”
Every word hit him like a punch to the gut.
A stab of his monster’s claws.
She was right.
She was right, gods be damned.
He had hurt her.
Deeply.
He could see the pain all over her face, the very same expression he’d worn for most of his life. He opened his mouth to speak, to say something, anything to reel the moment back in...but she wasn’t done yet.
“To you, I am just another servant. Just as my uncle was.” She let out a deep, trembling breath.
And shame washed over him anew, for not telling her about her uncle.
The bastard still rotting in the cell beneath her very feet.
“You’ve no care for the fear I have encountered, the sleep I have lost, and have you thought for one second what it is like to be me? ”
Of course I have, Kinlear thought, but then...
You’re lying to yourself, Little Prince, Magus’ voice called out to him. You’ve spent so much time peering beyond the Veil, into the future, that you’ve forgotten all about the here and now.
That was another flaw he’d noticed in himself.
He was Veilborne, so he lived half his life -- even more than that, when he was in runic sleep -- in a different timeline entirely.
And sometimes it felt impossible to stay rooted to the present.
To remember that no one else but he had seen what would come to pass.
So, he took her onslaught of attacks, because he deserved them.
Every damned word.
She continued, and he swore there were tears in her eyes now.
“To be ripped from a tower – where I spent two years alone behind a locked door just like this one. And furthermore, if you’ve no respect for me, Prince, then consider what it is like to be Six.
To be born and raised in the confines of a cage. ”
He blinked at her, as her words washed over him.
His face was red and hot and...
And he was furious, every bit as he was falling more for her. Because she understood. Gods, she understood, like nobody else ever had, what it was like to feel trapped. For her, it was a tower, and then a raphon cage, but for him?
For him, it was his own mind. Years of running from a monster, years of dying in his dreams, but even when he was awake, he couldn’t escape it. He lived his life the way he’d once told Soraya in a tear-stained letter, and he’d meant every word.
He was born in the shadows.
He was born as an echo, an afterthought, the dying side to his brother’s living light.
And it wasn’t even the crown. He didn’t give one godsdamned iota about the crown, for he saw the weight Arawn carried with it. No, for Kinlear, his burden was his own body, an eternal prison that he longed to be set free from. But it was impossible, for he couldn’t escape himself.
This illness was his fate. His body, his cage...and he wouldn’t escape from either until the Five called him home.
Until then, he would struggle. He would spend so much godsdamned time drowning in the sea of his own sleep, the way Marin had. He would carry her blade, terrified of ever putting it down, to the point that he’d demanded he never be put into a runic sleep without it. Because it he was?
He would risk missing out on seeing everything that sat in waiting up ahead.
Everything that he lived in constant fear of never getting the chance to experience in this body, weak as it was.
And that was Kinlear Laroux’s biggest fear:
That he would die...before he truly got to live.
That the gods forgot him, refused him, denied him time and again, and there was no one in the entire kingdom who understood.
He’d thought himself alone in that, but now he saw the truth, as Ezer’s words washed over him.
Ezer had been forgotten, too.
“If you’ve a problem with what I do, Prince Laroux,” she said, “then I will gladly step aside and allow you to mind Six yourself. Punish me if you wish. But there is nothing you can do to me. Nothing you can take. Not magic or family or –” she paused, her voice breaking. “There is nothing left.”
Behind her, the raphon had shifted, its eyes wide...
Almost as if in understanding.
He watched, silent, as Six padded across the stall and placed her enormous beak on Ezer’s small shoulder. It sighed deeply, breath reeking, and Ezer seemed to soften under that monstrous touch.
It was gentle. Beautiful.
And Kinlear’s heart broke at the sight of it.
He felt a familiar burn in his eyes. Gods...was he going to cry?
He had to get out of here. He had to walk away, carrying his shame like a boulder on his back. He winced as he stood, using his cane.
But before he left...
He turned back to her.
“I apologize if I hurt you. That was never my intention.” Gods, he was sorry.
He was so damned sorry he hadn’t seen her.
..only the future he wanted for them both.
“But for what it’s worth, Raphonminder, you have no clue what sort of confines I live within.
What pain I live with. And what sort of fate awaits me, if this plan fails. ”
He left her with Six in the darkness.
And walked, alone, back out into the light.